Blog update 9/11/2018
It's been a little over 3 months since my last update, and things are really going well!
Work-wise, I'm so, so happy that I'm a freelancer now. I have 2 main clients that I work for, I have a standing 10 hr/wk maximum agreement with one, and the other isn't a maintenance agreement but project based. Currently I have about 30 hrs/wk booked, billed whatever time I actually work. And sporadic hours for my old job, which I'm trying to phase out as much as possible.
Traffic
Last update in June was around 5000 users per month. Currently I have 12,000 users per month in the last 30 days. So I've more than doubled my traffic in 3 months! Most (76%) is from organic search, and my DA (according to Moz) is 22. Bounce rate is still quite high, around 90%. But I think part of that is due to me not giving my users many options to navigate to after they've finished reading a post. Which leads me to my next update...
Website Redesign
I was reading a subreddit called /r/juststart, which has a lot of self case studies of affiliate niche sites. Some of the posts are sites getting around the same traffic #'s as me, but they're making like $1,000/month from Amazon affiliates. I realized at that point that I need to get my monetization game in gear.
My homepage sucked. It had a header and then just a grid of blog posts, and the footer. Sign-up forms were only in the sidebar for posts. The past couple nights I've started redesigning the homepage and some global styles:
Work-wise, I'm so, so happy that I'm a freelancer now. I have 2 main clients that I work for, I have a standing 10 hr/wk maximum agreement with one, and the other isn't a maintenance agreement but project based. Currently I have about 30 hrs/wk booked, billed whatever time I actually work. And sporadic hours for my old job, which I'm trying to phase out as much as possible.
Traffic
Last update in June was around 5000 users per month. Currently I have 12,000 users per month in the last 30 days. So I've more than doubled my traffic in 3 months! Most (76%) is from organic search, and my DA (according to Moz) is 22. Bounce rate is still quite high, around 90%. But I think part of that is due to me not giving my users many options to navigate to after they've finished reading a post. Which leads me to my next update...
Website Redesign
I was reading a subreddit called /r/juststart, which has a lot of self case studies of affiliate niche sites. Some of the posts are sites getting around the same traffic #'s as me, but they're making like $1,000/month from Amazon affiliates. I realized at that point that I need to get my monetization game in gear.
My homepage sucked. It had a header and then just a grid of blog posts, and the footer. Sign-up forms were only in the sidebar for posts. The past couple nights I've started redesigning the homepage and some global styles:
- Changed the header from teal to a nicer more friendly blue color
- Added a hero on the homepage with a nice CTA headline/subhead that reads "Want to get better at coding? / Get practical tips for beginner web developers." With a form to signup right under.
- Updated the sidebar color to be blue also, added Amazon Affiliate disclaimer at the bottom of it, updated sidebar form CTA copy to match what I have on the homepage.
- Wrote 2 "best of" articles for books and courses with affiliate links, to be featured on the homepage
Still needs to be done:
- Display "best of" posts on the homepage
- Display 3 most recent blog posts on homepage
- Create /blog page which will display list of posts
- Implement some basic GTM/GA tagging to measure what's getting clicked
Social Media
I've been working on my Instagram game really solidly for the past few months, and it's paid off handsomely. In July I hit 2000 followers, and since then I've been posting every day almost without fail. I'm currently gaining around 10% of followers per week, e.g. I'm at 6000 something followers and have gained 600 something in the past week. Which is a crazy return if you think about it.
At this rate I should be hitting 10k sometime in mid-to late October, assuming my gain rate keeps increasing to stay at 10%. Then I'll be able to link out to stuff from my account! I'll have to start planning that out, to add highlighted stories to link to my major posts/pages, as well as a courses list with affiliate links.
I'm not planning on doing much else on social media. For Pinterest, the plan is to get my husband to design some awesome illustrations for pins for my "best of" pages, and hope they go viral on Pinterest. The pin he designed for my Absolute Beginner's Guide is still bringing in quite a bit of traffic because it went semi-viral. But I'm not going to do the manual pinning game, at least not right now.
Future Plans
I know eventually I want to make a course. What I've landed on as the topic is to do a very in-depth, step-by-step guide of making a website from the very beginning. Like creating files and folders, creating your HTML file with info on what goes in the head and stuff. Then going on to build a simple one-page website from the ground up, from the planning to wires to picking design styles and a color palette. Then the actual coding, along with my own thought processes for how I decide things like CSS classes and such.
What I'm going to do to work up to that point, is split up all that into a series of posts, each tackling one step in the website build. Then write a blog post with code snippets and screenshots.
Once that's all done, I'll make a video tutorial of each blog post and also make the files accessible.
It will be a quite in-depth course, so I'm not sure if I want to make that a paid course, or make it a free course. And later on make other, paid courses.
In some ways it makes more sense to make free tutorial videos on various topics in web dev. Like how to make a simple 2-col website structure, or various modules like an off-canvas menu, or a modal window.
But I can figure all that out as I go. Right now, as always, the trick is to figure out how to keep writing content!!
I haven't been very successful at that yet :P
But I'm looking forward to the next few months. I'm hoping I'll get a few more affiliate clicks, and break 10k, and have published at least a few articles by the next update.
Money-wise, I haven't made much at all, currently $3.71 from Amazon affiliate links.
